Star Trek: Picard.

The only other show I've been following as long as Star Trek is The Bold and the Beautiful, whose creators have decided to post most of the 9100+ episodes in YouTube, and as I'm watching those episodes, I see canon violations that would make Trek fans strike out. Granted, 99% of these episodes only aired once so it was easier to get away with fudging details but at the end of the day, I'm here to be entertained, not to keep score on every line of dialogue ever written in a franchise.

I feel like Trek fans would be much happier if we took that attitude to use what works for a story being told and ignoring what doesn't.

I've been watching the old reruns of Carol Burnett, and she had a running soap parody called "As The Stomach Turns" and man, does it nail everything.
Right down to the bad continuity. Every skit-episode, Vicki Lawrence is her slutty daughter, and Carol's character never recognizes her, and she has a new backstory every time.

I used to care more about canon and continuity but now I just rationalize that everything after DS9/VOY is some alternate universe or multiple alternate universes.

Not just the Kelvin timeline but I think Enterprise also existed in a slightly altered timeline due to the events in First Contact.

And everything spawned from Discovery onward is yet another alternate universe or maybe a soft reboot.

Comics have been doing this for a long time and Trek has already established precedent for parallel realities and altered timelines with the Mirror Universe, Yesterday’s Enterprise, etc.

Star Trek Picard is just a Patrick Stewart vanity project and best ignored entirely.

Other than Family and Undiscovered Country and The Wounded and It's Only A Paper Moon, Starfleet officers don't experience PTSD from prior adventures. Once the episode is over they bounce back physically and mentally like it never happened. That's just how the Trek universe works. Is it unrealistic? Probably. Is it also unintentionally canon? Yeah.

Also there's no fuckin' way the fleet at Earth that got Borged up was the entire fleet. Not even counting starbase crews, there had to be ships on urgent assignments or long-term exploration missions or important border patrols that didn't get to participate.

Agreed. Just like I don't think the whole fleet was 12 Starships in TOS or the ships at Wolf 359 made up the bulk of Starfleet's forces.
Sometimes you have to just allow hyperbole for the sake of drama.
Edit: oh, and your forgot to mention Extreme Risk.
Dammit, I'm a fucking nerd.

Did you watch Enterprise? They had a whole Borg episode to make it explicit that they timeline was slightly altered by First Contact, even before the Temporal Cold War altered things even further.

But the timeline is always being slightly altered one way or another, while still remaining the Prime timeline/universe. The timeline has always been flexible, ever since Edith Keeler.

Did you watch Discovery, particularly season 2? It turned out to be a major plot point that two warring factions from the future were altering the timeline in different ways, but it was still the Prime timeline getting messed with.

Then when you get to Season 3, they show that the events of one TNG episode happened exactly as we saw on TNG. And Season 4 confirms the events of PIC season 1.

It really is, and I hate it so much, but unfortunately it's canon, and all part of the same timeline. I just hope the writers ignore it in the future.

Fun fact: the Caretaker and his species were "Sporocystian" lifeforms.

Could the technology they used to transport Voyager to the Delta Quadrant have been related to the mycelial network all along?

The only good thing to come outta that show was getting a version of Seven of Nine that wasn't written with one hand.

Besides that....yeah.

100% of my enthusiasm for Legacy died with Liam Shaw.

They poured concrete on that grave when they renamed the Titan.

Well... One benefit to the ass writing of PIC S3 is that there's enough ambiguity left that Shaw could come back. We never saw the Koala come for his soul onscreen, so they could easily say Raffi and Seven somehow stabilized him with nanoprobes and chewing gum and stuck him in a closet before retaking the bridge, and now he's back on duty after months and months of physical therapy.

Up until Lore came back, the official story was that he was left in storage on the Enterprise D and destroyed along with the star drive in Generations.

He could, and as much as I'd like to see that, as a writer I also can't get excited about the idea that any death can be undone.
Even if I don't like the way they died, I'm always happy when people in Star Trek stay dead.
One thing I like about the deaths of characters like Kirk, Yar, and Dax is that most of the time your death is not noble. It isn't cinematic. It's just a wet fart of an event, and it sucks.
Shaw got a "better" death than most. I'd rather just leave it like that.

In hindsight, Picard was the onscreen manifestation of the other writers gradually manipulating Patrick Stewart out of his "'Logan' but with Picard" bullshit, and towards what we finally got in season 3.
Like viziers handling a difficult king.

Writing wise, I find that fascinating.
Just makes me like Picard more.
Yeah, it was a bumpy ride, but we got where we needed to go.
Like "National Lampoon's Vacation".

Yeah, Patrick Stewart is a great actor, but that's as far as it goes.
His creative ideas are mostly awful.
That's part of what tanked the b last two TNG films. That's what was getting in the way of Picard being at least close to what we'd hoped it wood be.
I mean, Chabon's alien tentacles of doom idea was bad too, but in general Stewart's "No ship, no uniform" idea was completely against what people even wanted a show like that to be.

Also, hot girls tend to avoid losers so it's no wonder that Federal Farmer never came across any.

There were hot girls at conventions. I saw plenty in the late 90's / early 2000s, before going to a convention was cool.
However, they were always on the arm of the hottest guys at the convention.
So it makes sense that FF didn't ever get close to any.

His parents probably wouldn't take him to any as he was too young.

No, no we did not.

S3 was shameless with the the TOS movie ripoffs, and we got to see the TNG gang together again, but the whole season was still a dumpster fire/character assassination/continuity nightmare, in addition to shitting on what Star Trek is supposed to be about. It doesn't even pass the "would it be more entertaining to just watch the cast have dinner together" test.


And I forget if that nerd girl said it in her 4 hour rant or if she reminded me of it, but Geordi filled in at the conn all the time before becoming chief engineer, and the first time he met Picard was when he piloted a shuttle for him. The idea that things would be awkward between Geordi and one of his daughters because she's also a conn officer as an ensign is absurd.

The best thing about Star Trek: Picard was I got to prove @We Are Borg and @Diacanu wrong.

I have not watched much of Enterprise and I watched even less of Discovery. By the time Voyager ended I was completely burned out on new Trek.

I have caught a few episodes of Enterprise here and there but have never found it interesting enough to go back and binge watch the series.

The characters are, to me, not very compelling and I was not interested in the major story arcs like the Xindi and the Temporal War.

I caught the first two or three episodes of Discovery, did not like it all and never went back to watch it again. I found the main character unlikeable. Did not like what they did with the Klingons.

However I really enjoy Strange New Worlds. It doesn’t fit together with TOS at all but I just enjoy it as its own thing, as I said a sort of soft reboot of the franchise.

They can say its part of the Prime timeline or whatever, I don’t really care. I think the show would actually be better if they didn’t try to tie it in with TOS. The writers would be free to do whatever they want with it rather than trying to mash it together with a show that is 60 years old.

The whole Spock/Chapel relationship is a big one. They barely ever interacted on TOS and definitely did not know each other intimately as is shown on SNW.

I try not to puzzle it together. There is no point. I just enjoy it as a new version of the story, same as I can enjoy Michael Keaton’s Batman and Christian Bale’s Batman as different iterations of that universe.

No, it’s a fact.
http://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/3403279/
I kept the receipts this time.

No E. You failed completely.

It's fine to say that Picard and Seven might deal with the potential PTSD of having been Borg differently from one might have expected, or one another.

But just within Picard's own journey, it's pretty inconsistent to the point where it mainly makes sense when you just accept that this is a fictional character doing whatever who's writing him wants rather than an organic person who, while occasionally messy or illogical or what have you, has a core personality and an evolving set of experiences.

Consider: At the end of Best of Both Worlds and Family, Picard must have to deal with having been assimilated by the Borg, having his knowledge and persona used to result in the deaths of thousands of Starfleet officers and threaten all of civilization. He certainly felt some level of fear of the Borg in subsequent TNG encounters, but he also was able to take the higher road and not upload a deadly virus into Hugh because he saw Hugh's humanity and didn't think infecting Hugh was an ethical thing to do even if it potentially got rid of the threat of the Borg. He was, to all appearances, in a psychologically healthy place as to the Borg.

Enter Star Trek: First Contact and its retcon of Picard's assimilation and his mentality. The guy who took a principled stand against killing a single Borg was enjoying tommyguning members of his crew, and was all Captain Ahab as if this was the first time he'd encountered Borg since BOBW. The only real way to square this Picard with the one who had been around since Family is the change in writing direction/needs and knowing that it's more cinematic to have Action Picard than to have Navigating-His-Way-Through-Moral-Dilemmas Picard.

It's sad that despite the future presumably having better medications, therapy regimens, universal health care, etc., Picard apparently does not deal in any meaningful way with any PTSD he may have in the wake of First Contact over the 20 or whatever years between then and Star Trek: Picard. I think that Picard could have been a more resonant series if it were written more as a character study of how JLP was in fact both haunted by his success and failures and gave him more stuff to do and PStew more room to work. Instead, I think they spent way too much time on the ensemble characters and on the half-baked plots of each season.

To each their own. The prequel stuff pieces together for me just fine. Some people make a lot of assumptions about the older stuff that they treat as gospel, when it's not.

With Spock and Chapel what we've seen so far makes sense to me. I've worked at the same place for 12 years, and I've seen people go from best friends and/or lovers to strangers during that time. You chat with a newer person, they have no idea that X and Y used to be a couple, or that Z used to be known as the fun nerdy stoner that came out for drinks every Friday before he got promoted.

A good portion of Chapel's TOS appearances involved her and Spock, including her having a crush on Spock. In The Naked Time, she confesses that she is in love with him. In Amok Time, she makes him plomeek soup which he and others see as a flirtation effort on her part and which angers him because he's in the middle of pon farr. In A Private Little War, she tries to interrupt Dr. M'Benga from striking Spock because she didn't realize that was part of the healing process for Vulcans. In What Are Little Girls Made Of? Spock questioned if Chapel could be sure that the person claiming to be her lost love Roger Korby was truly him, to which she replies to the effect of "Have you ever been engaged, Mr. Spock? Of course, I'm sure."

Yes, it's hard to square the notion that the actions in TOS with the notion that SNW presents us that Spock and Chapel had a relationship, that Chapel knew about Spock having been engaged to T'Pring, that Spock and Chapel presumably did the deed while they were dating, etc.

One could go through the mental gymnastics of "Well, maybe Chapel and he didn't sleep together in SNW even though SNW makes it clear that she has no problem being sexually active." Or "maybe something has affected their memories so that they no longer fully remember that they dated." Or "Maybe part of the reason why Chapel is so demure is because once bitten twice shy."

But I think it is easier to just accept the truth: TOS Chapel was written from the perspective of a mostly male writing staff in the 1960s writing for broadcast television, where they generally could at best imply sex and certainly could not explicitly say characters engaged in premarital sexuality. SNW Chapel is written from the perspective of a mixed gender contemporary writing staff where they do not have to deal with censorship or a large number of viewers who would be scandalized by the notion of consenting adults having premarital sex in general.

The difference between the coworkers who didn't see that X and Y used to be a couple is that we are privy to both the behavior in TOS and SNW, and it can and does seem inconsistent how they acted in TOS given their previous relationship in SNW.

It seems inconsistent to me that Chapel makes her confession of love in Naked Time as if it's a big mystery when they had a relationship. It seems inconsistent to me that Spock acts as though Roger Korby is being brought up to him for the first time when he was dating Christine before the engagement, when he recommended Christine for the internship prior to her ever meeting Korby and when he presumably has some unexpressed thoughts/emotions about his ex's fiance surfacing after a long unexplained disappearance.

Now one can square-peg/round-hole it all they want. But the simple truth is that TOS was not exactly airtight with its own continuity and so getting obsessed with canon from it to other shows is not where one should probably focus on being for relatively minor things like this.

^That^

So far I've been able to overlook (i.e. Romulan War fought at sub-light speed and such like) or head-canon basically everything that jumped out at me but one thing is always going to grind on me.

They cast a 39-year-old actor to play a guy canonically 12 or so years younger. Now they're shooting something that can't be more than a year or so on in universe and he's 42. Allowing no more work stoppages they still take around two years between seasons in our time. So if SNW ran 5 seasons he'll be 46 playing a guy who might be 30-32 in Universe .

That will annoy me enough but I might as well accept it - unless they then try to tell a story in the TOS era.

Maybe (and wisely, in my view, they could time-jump until after V'Ger, work in unplowed fields, and that 8-10 year jump would help reconcile the age problem.

I don't really have a point except to say that if you're a good enough storyteller, I can - and I think most can - roll with stuff that doesn't ACTUALLY make sense...but at the same time most of us have that one splinter that we can't get out.

One should also take into account the age at which each were assimilated and to what degree.

Picard was an adult and assimilated only to the point in which he was peripherally connected because, as we learned in First Contact, she (the queen) wanted him to want to be assimilated. This left him with both his own thoughts and values and impulses battling with suddenly being controlled.

Whereas with Seven, she was a child. She was already used to doing what others told her to do and she was fully assimilated, not even given the choice.

Seven accepted it as normal, so PTSD would not be as pronounced.
Picard fought every bit of it, therefore the PTSD would be eversomuchmoreso pronounced.

BTW the girl in that video is an actual physicist and her videos on science are very informative if anyone cares.

For Spock/Chapel, I see it as this:
Spock was encouraged by the crew to embrace his more human side. He did, and ended up falling for Chapel. He upended his Vulcan life and engagement for that, only for it to suddenly just end because she got a new job. This drove him to withdraw emotionally and become more bitter, thus the much more emotionally distant Spock who constantly berates humans in TOS. Also it explains his coldness towards Chapel, and her confession that she (still) loves him. It also explains T'Pring's actions in TOS. It also (sort of) explains why he was laughing in The Cage.